


It Was a Very Good Year

by openmouthwideeye



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:04:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openmouthwideeye/pseuds/openmouthwideeye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"From the brim to the dregs it poured sweet and clear; it was a mess of good years."</p>
<p>12 AUs for 12 months.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Was a Very Good Year

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Summer Fic-a-Thon 2013 at JBonline, where the lovely [A Calendar Series](http://puddle--wonderful.tumblr.com/tagged/a-calendar-series) was provided as a visual prompt. Each month equals it's own possible universe.
> 
> Apologies for the lack of editing. This was written in an evening and scarcely read over before posting. As you might expect it's really not my best work, but I hope it's still enjoyable to read.
> 
> *title and summary taken from "It Was a Very Good Year" by The Kingston Trio (Sinatra took it, too, so I'm in good company)

_**January**_

There is a bird chirping somewhere in the rafters. It feels discordant with the cold iron of the railway coffee shop, little more than a counter in an alcove, a few battered barstools tucked under the brushed nickel bar.

Jaime has been sitting at this barstool every night for two weeks, telling himself that tonight is the night he will hop a train. But Cersei is home waiting for him, his beautiful, jealous sister who never treated him quite like one should treat a brother, and never expected to be treated as a sister, either. She hates the weathered gray winter has brought to his temples, hates the way his crisp suits have gradually shifted to colorless ties and cotton cardigans.

He dreams away the life he dreamed himself into, sipping strong black coffee to keep the sting of reality sharp. He needs this, this grimy railside snow globe free of reds and golds and greens. Free of the Lannisters and how he fashions himself in his family’s image.

He can’t deny a part of him has other reasons for coming. Reasons that share his little coffee stop for precisely as long as it takes to receive a warm Styrofoam cup of tea and retreat to a bench unsheltered by the metal roof.

He wonders if she’s escaping someone, too, or if someone’s escaping her. She has a look of long-suffering about her, and her eyes flicker to trains with a single origin. He had thought she was plain—unattractive, even—last week when he’d first seen her try to slouch under banner ads that all but brushed her shoulder-length hair, leeched dry of moisture and color by the bitter winter wind. Her looks haven’t changed, but his mind has.

Another train passes, rattling by in a swirl of squeaking brakes and stale air, and the tall woman sighs and finishes her tea.

Jaime studies her.

Her skin is milk white; even her freckles pale beside the vestiges of his tan. Her teeth are large and ivory, and she always wears grey, as shining as the metal of the counter. She lives in a bleak world as he does, but for a calendar’s breath neither is devoid of color. She hoards it, and he enjoys it.

Her eyes are the brightest thing in the train station. Brighter even than the world beyond. Unbeknownst to her and him, they catch his heart and hold.

**  
**

_**February**_  

Brienne spends two personal days in bed with her new boyfriend, and when she faces the harsh realities of pushing papers for a lackluster P.I., she’s not surprised when her grin slips off her face and stays on the floor. It has always been a fickle friend.

The world is looking for love, digging through alleys and gutters, caught up in the desperation of red hearts and chocolate boxes, and she is grasping Jaime’s smile with a tentative heart, hoping she’s found something strong enough to survive the month.

She tells him to ignore Valentine’s Day and is rather disheartened when he does. But the next day there’s coffee on her nightstand, with little swirls in the cream and foam. She hasn’t given him a key, doesn’t trust him or her or this enough yet, but he got in anyway and she’s torn between gritting her teeth in irritation and melting into bed with a smile on her lips and a fresh cup of affection cradled warm in her palms.

“If you didn’t want me getting in you should try harder to keep me out,” he tells her when she mentions it. She is still not sure if she wants to curse him or kiss him, but thinks maybe she should give both a try.

“That’s a trap,” she tells him plainly, and he laughs at her.

“You’re learning.”

What’s she’s learning is that Jaime Lannister loves nothing so much as breaking boundaries. Brienne has spent a lifetime in clear-cut lines. But once or twice she’s found herself ordering him out, just to see how long he’ll stay.

She’s always pleasantly surprised.

 

_**March**_

She hasn’t seen Jaime Lannister since university, unless she counts that Forbes spread on the up-and-coming successors of last generation’s business moguls. She doesn’t; he hadn’t looked like him anyway, all hard angles and glossy bright paper. He does now, laughing at her from behind the wheel of his Lannister Corp crimson Peugeot as she trudges across the crosswalk in a downpour.

He finds her half an hour later, once the rain has stopped. She is still damp, clothes sticking in crevices she had forgotten about until discomfort and his eyes brings them rushing back in, sticky and inevitable.

“This seat taken?”

She can hear the laughter in his voice as he takes in her disheveled appearance, hunkered down with a mug of tea behind her work laptop.

“Yes.”

She glares at him, hating him just a little for the pristine lines of his suit, the easy swoop of his golden hair, unmarred by the rain’s humidity.

His disregards her and makes himself comfortable, just like old times, and Brienne finds she really doesn’t mind as much as she thought she would.

Just like old times.

 

_**April**_

She kisses him in a quiet garden with storm-worn marble beauties and gray lavender as witness. He drops his guitar in surprise, and the sound it makes as it hits the dirt is twice as melodic as any he’d made with frustrated, untrained fingers.

They are side by side on a stone bench, Jaime’s new 6-string kicked unceremoniously by their absent feet, and when she deepens the kiss a bee lands on her neck and Brienne jerks, cracking her teeth into Jaime’s and smashing their noses together.

The bee stings her anyway, and now it’s Jaime laughing at her as she sits in silence as stony as the statues around them.

“It’s no worse than my attempt to woo you with song,” he tries to sober up, but tears are leaking from the corner of his eyes.

“Our friends suck,” she mutters, dabbing at the blood on her lip because she’s not feeling brave enough to dab at his. “We aren’t Benedick and Beatrice.”

“Who?” he looks completely lost, and then she is feeling brave enough, so she shakes her head and kisses him until he gets the picture.

 

_**May**_

Jaime spends a semester in Italy pretending to be a local. He’s been speaking Italian since he learned words, eating in bistros on his mother’s knee while Cersei refused to sit until the cameriere brought her her own chair. It’s different now, without his sister, without his mother. Cersei left him freely and the loss of his mother had not hurt nearly as much as watching his twin board the plane she had warned him not to see off.

He meets Brienne at an out-of-the-way cafe. She is broad and ugly and studying a map more intently than it warrants, and she seems to Jaime a huge joke, so he pulls his Vespa alongside her table and offers her a ride.

She turns him down, and he spends three weeks chasing her out of sheer willfulness.

 She offends some locals by no other insult than being large and in the way and unable to speak Italian, and Jaime, who is strolling casually behind her, rescues her from the onslaught of harsh foreign words.

It takes her a month to realize he’s not Italian, and when she does she holes up in her hotel room for a week.

“Why did you lie?” she asks him, plain and honest as always. Her eyes are soft with sleep and faded tears, and her oversized blue shirt makes her look rumpled and innocent.

“Lannisters lie,” he tells her. He has no words more familiar than these.

Trust or naivety or some cruel trick orchestrated by his dead mother makes her blink at him with those wide doe eyes.

“But you don’t.”

He grinds his teeth and shrugs.

He makes her words a mantra.

“That painting’s shit.”

“ _The Birth of Venus_ is overrated.”

“I fucked my sister.”

“I love you, okay?”

He spends half a semester telling her whatever truth falls from his mouth, and when it is time for her to leave he tries again.

_I want you to stay._

_You’re beautiful, somehow._

_I’ll be on the next plane._

“It hurts less this way,” he lies as the metal bird roars above him, masking the sound his phone makes as it rattles against the cold gut of the trash can and sinks into the refuse below.

**  
**

_**June**_

Jaime follows the gangly girl with the smushed face down the beach. He can’t say why—he’s bored with the simpering dance of business associates half drunk on cocktails, and she looks like her dad had to drag her off the boat or plane or however the hell she got to this godforsaken beach off the coast of North Carolina.

He almost shouts some insult, just to amuse himself, but then she’s out into shadows, and her shoulders sink and soak them in. Broad shoulders. Used to swimming.

Without thinking Jaime kicks off his leather thongs and jogs after her.

“Hey! Tall chick!”

She jumps at the sound, tenses up and edges around slowly, as if she’s about to be ambushed.

Well, who is he to deny her?

“Your beach is shit,” he slings an arm around her shoulder, rubs a curious thumb along the sudden break in her splotchy freckles, skin revealed for the night by her cotton wife beater. “Flat. Prickly.”

“It’s not my beach,” she shakes him off, stalks forward without looking at the stranger trailing her.

Jaime knew that from the way she wrinkled her nose at the dead grass under the boardwalk. Her hair is almost as dead as the grass, and twice as pale.

“What is?” he hitches his elbow up onto her shoulder, leaning into her. The way it stretches his tendons is mildly irritating.

“None of your business.”

“Your father is my father’s business. That makes you mine.”

It really is interesting the way he can feel her muscles shifting under his arm. He wonders why she hasn’t thrown him off this time.

She doesn’t answer.

“I’m used to rockier beaches,” he says to fill the silence. The gentle lap of the waves bothers him; it’s nothing like the crash of the ocean should be. “Maine. England. Greece.”

She remains staunchly unimpressed. Approaches the water, dips her toes in the caress of the late night tide.

Jaime lets her escape him.

“Beaches should be blue and white,” she mutters, staring out and the charcoal-and-slate waters that edge in to kiss her freckled feet. As placid as a lake. “They should _live_.”

“The tropics?” he guesses. “Hawaii?”

“Water Island.” She offers it grudgingly, breathing in the salt as unwittingly as Jaime himself is doing.

“The Virgin Islands.” He’s unaccountably thrilled. “That’s interesting.”

She looks at him sideways, like she’s heard those jokes all her life, and they’ve never stopped being true. Her lips are plump and chapped, kissed by sun and wind and nothing else. Suddenly, he has an irrational urge to tease with more than just words.

He tosses his blazer behind him on a whim, tugs his grey cotton tee over his head. Then he starts on his belt.

Her eyes widen before she rockets them in the other direction, and for a second he can see what she was saying about blue waters. He shakes off the feeling with his shorts.

“Race you to the buoy.”

He’s splashed in before she responds, and he doesn’t know why he grins into the sea when her smooth, clothed form cuts the water an endless breath later.

**  
**

_**Jul** y_

“I’m a liar and a kid-killer,” Jaime smiles cuttingly, sloshing the harsh whiskey over his scarred right hand as he offers her the bottle with more than a little mocking.

The girl flinches, but doesn’t back away. Surprising, that.

She takes the booze firmly in hand, sets it beneath the picnic table with the chipping white paint. He sees her eyes linger on the alcohol, flicker to the cigarette dangling in his left hand.

“It’s not going to catch,” he snorts, flicking ash towards her.

He has needled her too far, he can tell. It’s written in the sudden flash of her Skyy blue eyes.

He leans back against the table, kicks his legs up on the bench. Waits for her to leave.

She snatches the cigarette from his surprised fingers, grinds it angrily beneath her track sneaker.

“Bran Stark was an accident,” she barks, though he can tell she doesn’t believe it. Her eyes beseech him; her heel grinds more insistently into the gravel.

_I was more sober than Cersei_ , he thinks as he takes in her defiant expression, _but that was no excuse for me to drive._

“Is that why you’re here?” he mocks her, pulling another smoke from his jacket and lighting it from a dwindling pack of matches he keeps in his jeans. He hates lighters, always has, fluid and plastic and the harsh click of wait-for-it. “To save me?”

“I don’t care if you rot,” she tells him, and he believes her. “Mrs. Stark wants – “ her voice falters as it hasn’t before, and he tucks away the weakness for later consideration, “ – to hear your side.”

“By all means,” he gestures the bench below him with a wave of his cigarette. Smoke and ash trail the air. “Rot beside me.”

He doesn’t expect her to take his offer, and she doesn’t. She uses the bench as a stepping stone and lands heavy beside him, all broad shoulders and ugly features, prim and resolute and as far from him on the picnic table as she can get. He hasn’t noticed before, but he thinks she’s taller than him.

He doesn’t expect her to speak, either, but when she does her voice is quiet, unyielding.

“I can wait.”

**  
**

_**August**_

“What,” Brienne grumbles at him, “Did you do?”

Jaime shrugs.

“The kids thought it was fun.”

He gives no further explanation, and Brienne decides she really doesn’t want one. She presses her lips, unamused, and snatches the broken rope from the ground. She inspects the fraying ends, uncomfortable with his eyes on her, and coils the line around her shoulder.

“I’ll never know how you got this job when you can’t climb.”

“Good looks and charm,” he says innocently.

She glares at him, and he rolls his eyes.

“It’s a _summer camp_ job,” he tells her. “We’re glorified babysitters.”

That’s a different tune than the one he was singing last week when his cousin Myrcella was a camper with her friend Sansa. Jaime had spent half the week getting them into trouble, and the other half bailing them out of it.

Brienne doesn’t respond, because she has shimmied up the tree’s broad trunk and is busy swinging onto the thick branch that should hold the tire swing.

Jaime cranes his head to watch as she ties a sturdy knot, testing it twice before throwing the rope down to him. He catches it deftly in his left hand, eyes never leaving her.

“You’ll have to tie this one, too,” he hollers up at her, waving his broken arm as if she’s forgotten.

Brienne walks the branch back to the trunk then scrambles down, ignoring the way bark scrapes the wide white thighs exposed by her camp shorts. When she reaches Jaime she snatches the rope from his hand, hauls the heavy tire up onto her knee.

“Hop on,” he orders when it is securely tied back in place.

She crosses her arms and Jaime gives her a long-suffering look.

“It has to be safe for the kids, right?”

She doesn’t know why that sways her, but it does. She digs her foot into the groove of the rubber, pulls herself up and around until she is straddling the rope and her legs are dangling down the far side of the tire.

Jaime takes a running start and latches on alongside her, careening them wildly into air and branches and leaves. Her breath strangles the shout in her mouth, and then it is bursting free with her laughter, and the sound is mingling with his in the summer breeze.

**  
**

_**September**_

Brienne drops her book in surprise when the worn leather flies in the open window and skids across her meticulously arranged papers. Tyrion glances up from another corner of the library, rolls his eyes and refocuses on his book of Norse Mythology. Brienne cradles the football in one hand, running a calloused thumb along the familiar stitches.

She takes her time straightening her papers, and by the time she reaches the open window, Jaime is visibly impatient.

“Get your ass down here. It’s only the second week of classes.”

She clutches the football longingly, tucks it to her ribs, sighs and tosses it back to him. It spirals prettily down the three-story drop; the only pretty thing Brienne has ever managed.

“I’ve got papers,” she calls, shuts the window.

She doesn’t flinch when the football plunks against the glass and falls back to the ground below. She does glance down to the yard, a moment of weakness as she shuffles her papers back into some semblance of order. The brown leather blends into rich earth and grass, abandoned where it fell.

“I’ll give you an hour,” Jaime warns as he plops his heavy messenger bag on top of her newly gathered papers. She glares sideways, but the sight of him is more familiar than the smell of old books and warmer than the feel of well-loved leather in her palm.

“Start studying.”

Jaime knocks his bag flat and digs out a textbook, and Brienne does her best to wrestle her notes from beneath the canvas without tearing her pages.

His foot catches her ankle under the table, and Brienne blushes and says nothing.

**  
**

_**October**_  

There is a black cat twisting into the fabric at her ankles, and Jaime hovers back and watches as she scratches its ear, glides a hand along its tail. The half-grown feline disappears beneath the pink velvet of her dress. Jaime snorts to himself as it bats the material and Brienne tries to nudge it out with her toes.

“Lucky cat,” Jaime greets her, and the cat darts away, lighting quick across the orange light of the sunset until it disappears behind the merrily glowing house.

Brienne turns a questioning brow on him, and he sits on the bench beside her.

“I’ve been trying to get under your skirt all afternoon,” he grins, picking up a fold of fabric on her thigh and rubbing it suggestively between his fingers.

She clenches her hands as if she’ll bat his away, but she only sets her shoulders and looks away, across the yard of dying grass and fading yellow leaves.

Jaime drops her skirt, disappointed.

“I expected you to come as Joan of Arc,” he admitted, following her gaze into the trees. “Or some fierce Viking warrior.”

The party is in full swing, and Jaime can hear the drunken laughter clear across the yard. He wonders who they are laughing at now. He can see Brienne’s broken skin in the dying autumn light. Her knuckles are bloody, bright against the soft rose of her ill-fitting gown.

“This was all they had,” she whispers.

_At the last minute,_ goes unsaid.

“I guess it’s fine for punching out Hoat and his beary band of followers,” Jaime jokes, watching as Brienne’s eyes flicker to him, then away to study the cracked freckles on her hand. “But you’re hotter in a hoodie.”

Her eyes leap to his. She’s startled and upset and clearly ready to punch the guy she’d just punched Hoat for.

“ _Stop_ making fun of me.”

So he mutters, “Well, if you don’t believe me . . .” and catches the soft fabric at her waist so he can kiss her like he’s wanted to since sophomore year, when Brienne knocked him on his ass for talking smack about her mentor.

Brienne stiffens, and he snakes his hand into the material of her skirt like the fled black kitten, and Brienne kisses him back like one false step will send her scurrying after the creature into the dark.

“Tonight is technically Mischief Night,” he informs her once he releases her, and her eyes squeeze shut like he’s about to say “April Fool’s,” so he has to kiss her again.

He kisses her a lot that night, coaxing her with caresses as she tries to insist that childish pranks on Hoat’s car is really not the best way to handle conflict.

He does all the work, and she threatens to tell her RA, and he drags her back to his apartment and lends her some old warm-ups that were always a little big on him. They spend the night telling ghost stories until they are both too keyed up to sleep, and the next morning he wakes up to find her smiling at the ugly old dress hanging from the back of his couch.

**  
**

_**November**_  

It takes her until well into autumn to realize that the scruffy, numbingly attractive recluse living in the cabin half a mile down is the infamous Jaime Lannister. Penrose Ranch may be lacking in cable, but Brienne can recognize the perfect, disdainful features of the bombshell blonde she sees stalking up the step-stones while Honor enjoys his afternoon exercise. Eddie has a pinup of Cersei Lannister in the barn’s musty office, a candid bikini shot from some photo shoot in the businesswoman’s teen years. Seeing them together, Jaime leaning against the doorframe in a white fisherman’s sweater while Cersei tries to shove past him, all power suits and heels, Brienne can see it. Eyes and nose, lips and jaw. A grimy mirror with a sturdy doorframe between.

She wonders who is the image, and who the reflection.

Brienne’s father spent years disparaging Tywin Lannister’s dirty business tactics. She hears him echoing across the years, gravel voice and calm eyes.

“Those Lannisters don’t think twice about the little man making his way in the world.”

She sees the disappointed shake of his salt-and-sand hair.

It hurts more than she thought it would, all these months later.

Cersei leaves, looking angry, and even though she has a chauffeur, the little red sports car peals angrily across the dingy road strewn with dead and dying autumn.

Brienne doesn’t want to know almost as much as she does, but Honor ignores her firm hand and clops up to the stone path to nudge his nose against her neighbor’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” Brienne says, embarrassed, as she tries to inch him away by the reigns.

“Hey old friend,” the man smiles faintly, and Brienne blinks at the rueful affection that rumbles low in his chest. His hand runs up between Honor’s eyes, rubs slowly back down to let the horse nudge his palm for treats. “None today.”

Jaime Lannister’s eyes catch on the air beneath his rolled right sleeve. His head slowly turns to follow the car that is barely a spec on the winding mountain pass.

“Do you – want to talk about it?” she asks, hesitant, as Jaime runs a hand along the wide, sleek column of Honor’s neck. She can feel the heat of him on her thigh, and it melts into the heat of her mount.

Jaime’s mouth twists bitterly, and she wishes she hadn’t said anything.

“They find us no matter where we go.”

Brienne looks behind him, takes in the little cottage with its patched roof and weathered shutters. She passed it a hundred times, riding shotgun with her father while he regaled her with stories and songs and promises of the adventures she would find on his friend Cortnay’s ranch. As a girl this cabin seemed dead and unforgiving, a husk of a home left to admonish passersby.

It seems strangely inviting now, with the warm husk of a man on the steps out front.

“Will you let me in?”

She doesn’t know what stirs the question, or what boldness draws it from her lips, but Jaime raises a curious brow at her, and he ties Honor’s reigns to the post out front before she has slid from the saddle.

“Grab me a log,” he says over his shoulder, snagging a cast-iron teapot and filling it with water. “You’ll need to stoke the fire.”

She grabs a log and adds it to the flames, but the worn yellow warmth has already enveloped her, and she no longer feels the cold.

**  
**

_**December**_  

The red berries look like blood scattered on the snow. Jaime curses the cold and squashes them underfoot while Brienne silently breathes into her mittens, hoping the hot, wet air will seep into her flesh and reanimate it. The numbness should be soothing, but it only feels like losing.

“Your blasted friends better appreciate this,” Jaime grumbles, glaring at everything and stuffing his hands more deeply into his pockets. He lost his gloves to the Christmas tree that disappeared down a snowy crag almost an hour ago.

He hasn’t forgiven the winter since.

“It’s not the Stark’s fault,” she reasons. “We were the ones that offered.”

Her eyes catch the axe resting in the curve of Jaime’s elbow. She wants to suggest they find another tree, but the world is a whirl of white, and she doesn’t know how they will find their way back, even if they’re hauling the perfect festive pine along with them.

Jaime had laughed, all those hours ago, and teased that the chore might be romantic. “We’ll take a stroll on ice-kissed paths and melt the cold with love.” She wouldn’t let on that she hoped he was right, and he wouldn’t let on that he’d only said it for her.

Her lips are numb, now.

“Jaime.” She catches his sleeve, winces when the axe tumbles and the blade catches his jacket. “Take my gloves.”

It is not the first time she has offered. This time he yanks a hand from the protection of his pocket. She thinks for a minute that the cold has finally overcome his chivalry, but then Jaime snatches her mittened hand in his and stuffs them both into his pocket.

“You’re not getting romance for a year,” he grumbles.

Brienne feels his thumb, caressing small circles in the melting fabric of her mittens.

Lady will find them soon, she knows. Will come loping through the trees, appearing suddenly from the haze of flurrying snow with her siblings behind, snapping her teeth in a familiar click that Brienne hears as ‘hello.’

Until then she leans against her husband, and together they trudge through the heavy snow.

**Author's Note:**

> Please take a few moments and leave me your thoughts.


End file.
